The Sweetest Poisons: Preston Sprinkle's "Embodied" Chapter 4: Male and Female in the Image of God

This is the sixth installment in my series reviewing Preston Sprinkle's book Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, & What the Bible has to Say. Click HERE for the Intro to this series where I discuss my thematic concerns with the book and for an index for the full series.

Preston Sprinkle opens Chapter 4 by asking 

If someone experiences incongruence between their biological sex and their gender, which
one determines who they are—and why? What does the Bible say about this question?

so finally it seems as though we are about to get his argument. As a word to my readers, it is going to be important to read some of the previous installments in this review series before reading this post so that you will be familiar with what I have already said about Dr. Sprinkle's rhetorical approach and the various assertions he has made which depend on either insufficient evidence or outright scientifically inaccurate and/or discredited sources.

In this Chapter Dr. Sprinkle wants to link maleness and femaleness to each person's participation in the imago dei—the Image of God. He structures the argument around 8 propositions (or "thesis statements") and the bulk of the chapter is made of of defenses of his propositions. Sprinkle's 8 theses are:

1. The body is essential to our image-bearing status.
2. Male and Female in Genesis 1 are categories of sex, not gender.
3. Adam and Eve's bodies are viewed as sacred.
4. Jesus views Genesis 1-2 as normative.
5. Paul sees the body as significant for moral behavior and correlates the body with personhood.
6. Scripture prohibits cross-sex behavior.
7. The incarnation of Christ affirms the goodness of our sexed embodiment.
8. Sex difference probably remains after the resurrection.

Dr. Sprinkle then offers a brief summary of three short paragraphs and two teaser questions for the following chapter. My plan for this installment in the review is to work through each of Dr. Sprinkle's "thesis statements" and to then respond to his summary. So buckle in, this is going to be a long post.

1. THE BODY IS ESSENTIAL TO OUR IMAGE-BEARING STATUS

Sprinkle's opening claim in this section is "Whatever the image of God points to, one thing is rather clear: our bodies are essential to bearing God's image." The statement comes at the end of a paragraph recognizing that there is significant scholarly debate as to what it means to bear God's image". He then supports this claim by highlighting interpretations of "image" and "likeness" which derive from the concept and terms for "idol". It is worth noting that at no point does Dr. Sprinkle engage with the multiple theological positions which do not think that our bodies as such are "essential to bearing God's image" though he does reference a text (The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 by J. Richard Middleton which presumably does so. Regardless there are, as Sprinkle began with, quite a few takes on what is essential to being Image-of-God bearers. Here is the Wikipedia link but the subject of what constitutes Imago Dei endlessly fascinating. 

Dr. Sprinkle's primary argument for his claim is based on an analysis

On the one hand it seems more than a little unfair to demand that Dr. Sprinkle adequately address every significant theory of the Imago for the purposes of a book in which his use of the question is only one portion. On the other it is worth remembering that Dr. Sprinkle is writing a book with profound implications for how individual Christians will treat actual transgender friends, siblings, children, spouses, and parents and that it also seems more than a little unfair to demand that Dr. Sprinkle be excused from making an adequate case before prescribing some sort of attitude towards, or beliefs about, trans people. If you were to have your parent deny the reality of who you are would you be satisfied if the book they were relying on had cut corners in research or in the complexity and thoroughness of its research or argumentation?  

What I find even more concerning is that the conclusion of this section (the last two sentences) upon which Sprinkle goes on to base a great deal of his argument, isn't even argued for. As a Christian, a thinker, a trans person, and a theologian I don't have a huge objection to the premise that being embodied (at least at some point in our existence) is an important aspect (I hesitate to say "essential" as I believe that the dead do not lose their status as divine image bearers and only regain it at the resurrection) of our divine image bearing, but I do think that after spending 95% of the words in this section arguing only that embodiment is essential, Sprinkle then just asserts, as though it were the conclusion of the section despite his not having brought it up until this very moment, in a sentence fragment that "not just our embodied nature, but our sexed nature [is highlighted by the most fundamental statement about human nature]. A claim which is highly debated to say the least. He does attach a footnote to the claim in which he cites two texts (God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality by Phyllis Trible and In His Own Image and Likeness: Humanity, Divinity and Monotheism by Randall Garr) as evidence that "male and female" are "important" to human's relationship to the image of God but he neither summarizes their arguments to that effect, nor provides his own, and it is worth noting (this will become more clearly relevant in my response to the next of Dr. Sprinkle's thesis statements) that Dr. Phyllis Bird, in her paper "Bone of my Bone and Flesh of my Flesh" argues that 

The parallel terms "image" (selem) and "likeness" (děmût) have a single meaning in combined usage and do not describe distinct attributes. They qualify each other to suggest wholistic but noncorporeal resemblance and representation. [bold emphasis mine, italics original]

Conclusion:

By the end of this section Dr. Sprinkle has provided some evidence for his claim but has successfully argued at most that maleness and femaleness are important (he doesn't really even argue for "necessary" or "essential") in understanding what it means for humans to be created in the image of God. It is important that he has not argued (much less demonstrated) that the Image of God requires maleness or femaleness.

2. MALE AND FEMALE IN GENESIS 1 ARE CATEGORIES OF SEX, NOT GENDER

Dr. Sprinkle's argument for this thesis statement begins with the argument that "the command to reproduce [in Genesis 1:28] wouldn't make much sense if 'male and female' were highlighting social or psychological aspects of being male and female." Already there is a bit of rhetorical equivocation in the claim since since Preston is reducing what trans people will describe as a fundamental sense of self as a given gender" to "social or psychological" and then merely saying that such an aspect of ourselves isn't being "highlighted". Of course it is entirely possible for something to be included or even integral without it's being "highlighted" so taken strictly, Sprinkle's claim here is rather uncontroversial but also doesn't claim as much as he is later going to suggest (he goes on to behave as though he had proven the statement "the command to reproduce wouldn't make much sense if 'male and female' necessarily included aspects of being male and female". 

Dr. Sprinkle's primary argument in this section consists on a citation of Phyllis Bird's Paper "Bone of my Bone and Flesh of my Flesh" published in Theology Today (1994). Sprinkle introduces the quote by noting "For what it's worth, Bird isn't a particularly conservative scholar; she's a feminist and an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church. She's probably not going to be invited to speak at the Gospel Coalition's national conference anytime soon. Anyway she argues that the creation accounts of Genesis present the categories of male and female as 'indispensable to their understanding of humankind by explicit attention to the sexual differentiation of the species'." and then introduces the quote that forms the center of his argument for this thesis statement:

Sex is the constitutive differentiation, observable at birth and encoded in our genes, essential for the survival of the species, and basic to all systems of socialization. It plays a fundamental role in the identity formation of every individual. It must consequently be regarded as an essential datum in any attempt to define the human being and the nature of humankind—and thus provides a primary test for false notions of generic humanity.

Out of curiosity (and, by this point, a little suspicion) I went and found the paper he is citing. It turns out that in the original, Dr. Bird included a footnote (footnote 27) just after the word "genes" in the above text which reads:

Modern biological and psychological understanding of sex reveal a much more complex phenomenon than the dimorphic classification recognized by most societies, with wide variation of expression and disparities between observable and genetic indicators. Theological assessments and "common sense" views of appropriate behavior based on a simple dichotomous view of sex are no longer adequate? See Bird "Genesis I-III, p. 44.  Alongside this recognition of grater complexity in the markers and meaning or sex as a human attribute, there is also new attention to the cognitive consequences or correlates of sexual identity. On its implications for faith, see James B. Ashbrook, The Brain and Belief: Faith in the Light of Brain Research (Bristol, Indiana: Wyndham Hall, 1988), and "Different Voices, Different Genes: 'Male and Female created God them,' " Journal of Pastoral Care 46 (1992), pp. 174-183.

which would seem to indicate that Dr. Bird is in fact saying almost the opposite of the claim Dr. Sprinkle is defending in his citation of her work. 

I should further note that Dr. Bird's conclusion in the paper specifically notes (in a gloriously trans affirming way) that 

In a world of multiple "others," I will fail to represent them all or adequately, but this does not lessen the obligation, and the inadequacy of my formulation can only be corrected by the word of the other. We do not need to hear every voice to gain a sense of common opinion or see every exemplar to grasp the essential nature of the species. But we do need every voice and every exemplar to know the fullness of that nature formed in the image of God. Thus our answer is never complete; it is always subject to modification by new experience, and it is the diversity of representatives that testes the adequacy of the statement. 

Sprinkle ends this section with a sort of pseudo-feminist celebration of Genesis 1 as affirming the value of women as co-image bearers with men. It is not clear to me how this claim depends in any way on the thesis statement that Genesis 1 is using sex and not gender as its categories. He does say "If sex differentiation is irrelevant here, then the profound elevation of females as distinct from males loses its significance" but the claim is rather confusing. If all humans are created in the image of god then a statement to that effect is just as liberating to marginalized female humans and is also liberating to all other oppressed humans. If Sprinkle is interested in a liberatory reading of Genesis 1: 27, restricting its liberatory implications to "females" would seem to be a backwards move. Further, Sprinkle's choice to use "females" rather than "women" in order to highlight the "sex not gender" point he is trying to make here feels more than a little physically reductive. He promised earlier to address concerns around intersex people in Chapter 7 but having not yet done so, this phrasing would seem to suggest that Sprinkle views God as seeing uterus-people as equal to penis-people which...sure, but there is a lot more to it than that and putting it that way just seems dehumanizing. And that is a point that Dr, Phyllis Bird makes admirably in the paper Preston cites in this section; one wonders, almost, whether Dr. Sprinkle has bothered to read it.

Conclusion:

I am not really that concerned with this thesis statement per se. I do find Dr. Sprinkle's reasoning and citation choices to be lacking but if I were sitting down to a debate with him I would likely want to point out that insisting on a sex/gender distinction for Genesis is anachronistic but would mostly shrug and grant this point. The problem with it is primarily in what Sprinkle doesn't say but later acts as though he had. He doesn't ever say that "male and female" in Genesis 1 being about sex rather than gender means that those categories are immutable in individual humans or that said reference amounts to a divine affirmation of those categories, but he will go on to build arguments that act as though he had. And that is a problem since those latter claims are far harder to defend and significantly more problematic.

The most significant issue is Dr. Sprinkle's use of a source which is, in fact, arguing the precise opposite of the claim he cites it to support.  

3. ADAM AND EVE'S BODIES ARE VIEWED AS SACRED

This is a strange little section. The argument is only that Genesis 2 shares architectural language with the descriptions of the temple and that therefore human bodies are sacred. I actually agree with Sprinkle's thesis statement as it is given though I found his argument rather weak. Wouldn't it have been better to have merely quoted 1 Corinthians 6:19 and have done with it? Perhaps he was concerned that that would have communicated that only the bodies of Christians are sacred. Regardless the claim itself is benign. 

Except that, after not arguing  for anything regarding sexed-ness in this section, Dr. Sprinkle ends with 

Genesis 1-2 speaks about our sexed embodied nature as something significant for human identity. Our sexed bodies are like sacred pieces of architecture. [emphasis mine]

 You see what he did? After arguing merely that our bodies are sacred he then slipped in the strong implication that the sexed-ness of our bodies is sacred. Yes, our bodies are variously sexed; yes our bodies are sacred but that does not imply that sexed-ness is necessary to the sacredness of our bodies. Of course Sprinkle hasn't outright said that it does. He doesn't seem to like saying these things outright.

Conclusion:

At this point in the chapter, Sprinkle's project is starting to become clear. He has been making largely inoffensive or generally accepted statements, making arguments in support of them, and then sneaking in specifically anti-trans implications so that the reader leaves each section with the impression that Sprinkle has demonstrated something that undermines the transgender Christian position without his having to actually forward said arguments.

4. JESUS VIEWS GENESIS 1-2 AS NORMATIVE

Here it is.

This claim is the one that seems most often to stand between people who disagree over whether or not God affirms the gender identities of trans people. Sprinkle has set himself squarely on the side of those who claim that God does not affirm our gender identities and it was something of a disappointment to find that his argument for this crucial point consisted entirely of three short paragraphs and a quote from Matthew 19. But I was excited to dive into the argument he would make on this critical point. After all. If, in his citation of Genesis 1 in Matthew, Jesus was claiming that all humans are supposed to conform to the "male and female"-ness of Adam and Eve(1)then that would, at a minimum, seem to strike a blow against biblical support for the validity of non-binary gender identities and would lend some validity to the now-exhausting tendency of non-affirming theobrogians to quote "in the beginning God created them male and female" at us though it were some sort of anti-trans incantation. 

Strangely Dr. Sprinkle's argument for this thesis is rather...lackluster might be the best word. His support for this thesis consists entirely of quoting Matthew 19:4-5 and then restating the thesis, a citation from a single commentary on Matthew, and then a rhetorical retreat by admitting that it would actually be a mistake to read too much into what Jesus says in Matthew 19 than what He intended which Sprinkle records as "a rather simple point—taken for granted in Judaism at his time—that marriage is a union between two people of different biologicals sexes [Dr. Sprinkle fails to notice the anachronism here], male and female. Embodied sex difference is assumed, but it's not as if Jesus is directly addressing a question about trans* identities" [emphasis mine].  So Sprinkle asserts, cites a single commentary, re-asserts, then backs off to the caveat that actually this isn't the point Jesus was making in this passage and it would be a mistake to read to much into what He did say. 

So far as I can tell, Dr. Sprinkle is once more attempting to have his cake and eat it too. He makes a bold assertion and will use that bold assertion (it is one of his eight thesis statements after all) throughout the rest of the book but his actual defense of it is paper thin (more on that commentary in the paragraph below) and the only position he is actually staking out is one far easier to defend if challenged: that Jesus seems to be taking certain things for granted when answering a question which has nothing to do with the question of trans identities—a rather good example of the motte and bailey fallacy but hardly worthy of a text which purports to help Christians think about one of the most contentious cultural/social topics of our day.

But Dr. Sprinkle's Bailey does come with one citation: page 10 of the third volume in W.D. Davies and Dale C. Allison's A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. I was eventually able to track down page 10 of that text. Sprinkle's use of it is first to assert (without citation) that "The idea of "male and female" is not just relevant to the beginning of creation" and then to cite Davies and Allison on for the following sentence to the effect that "Jesus operates with the conviction that "the created order" was expressed in Genesis 1-2 "is a guide for the moral order" and 

technically Dr. Sprinkle is not misquoting his text here. Page 10 of vol. 3 of the Critical and Exegetical Commentary does indeed contain that quote. But... well let me just give you the full paragraph:

Jesus continues by quoting another Scripture, Gen 2.24 (a secondary interpolation which appears to be 'generically antipolygamous and implicitly antidivorce'). Again the created order is a guide for the moral order.

I have two items to note. First the section of Davies and Allison that Dr. Sprinkle is quoting here does not reference "male and female he created them"; that passage is Genesis 1:27. Gen 2:24 is "a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife and the two become one flesh", which does indeed seem to have a lot more to do with divorce than it has anything to do with "the idea of 'male and female'" except as accidentals. In particular, the citation for this sentence has nothing to do with the claim Dr. Sprinkle used to set up the sentence. Further Sprinkle very clearly ignored the clarification that his source so helpfully provides, that this reference to the created order is, in fact, a reference specifically to divorce and not to "The idea of 'male and female' as Dr. Sprinkle insinuates. Second, Davies and Allison do in fact address Jesus' reference to "male and female he created them" a page earlier, but there they even more unavoidably insist that Jesus reference to Genesis 1:27 "responds to the question about divorce by raising the question about monogamy"(2). Nowhere in this section of the commentary do Davies and Allison seem to be at all interested in "the idea of 'male and female" as having anything directly to do with the point Jesus was making in Matthew 19.

Conclusion:

In this section Dr. Sprinkle declines to actually support his thesis statement aside from providing a single commentary which itself doesn't even claim to support his statement before retreating to an acknowledgement that his thesis statement is "assumed" (though he provides no evidence in support of this weaker claim either) and not the point of what Jesus was actually saying.

5. PAUL SEES THE BODY AS SIGNIFICANT FOR MORAL BEHAVIOR AND CORRELATES THE BODY WITH PERSONHOOD

I am going to be a bit more brief in my response to this section the chapter. If Sprinkle had ended his thesis statement at "behavior" my only significant complaint would be that he is being a tad rhetorically slippery in his use of "significant" where he will go on to act as though he had said something like "necessary" in its place. His habit of carefully nuanced claims which he later treats as sweeping statements notwithstanding the first clause is generally accurate. In fact trans people (despite ubiquitous Evangelical claims to the contrary) generally also see the body as "significant for moral behavior" and that forms a significant part of the spiritual justification for our transitioning. If the body matters then surely having a body which conforms to our total person is a good thing.

Unfortunately Dr. Sprinkle chose to add a second claim to this thesis: "Paul ... correlates the body with personhood". This could have been salvaged—the claim is debated but not implausible—if he hadn't chosen to treat this debate as something settled. In fact one of the more rancorous theology debates of the last decade hinged on Paul's view of the body. Here the sources that Dr. Sprinkle cited were better than we have seen from this chapter so far and mostly lacked any serious acknowledgement of the debated-ness of the claim within theological circles. Here again we see Preston's unfortunate habit of presenting debated subjects as settled in his favor while exaggerating fringe objections to well-established positions as representing a "real debate on the topic.

As to the claim itself, that "Paul...correlates the body with personhood" my own objection is simply to point out that both the Holy Spirit and the First Person of the Trinity are persons who are not embodied; that most Christian understandings of the blessed dead hold that they are still persons even in the period of time prior to the resurrection in which they do not have bodies, and that Paul himself speaks as though the "great cloud of witnesses" are persons despite their having bodies. Which all suggests that while Paul does certainly see bodies as important (both for good and for evil) he does not actually correlate "the body with personhood".

Conclusion

This section is relatively innocuous but it does demonstrate a few of Dr. Sprinkle's more unfortunate rhetorical habits.

6. SCRIPTURE PROHIBITS CROSS-SEX BEHAVIOR

Dr. Sprinkle spends significantly more words on this thesis statement than on the previous ones. He sets the section up with a bold (if anachronistic) claim:

Scripture doesn't often mention people publicly presenting themselves as the opposite sex. But when it does, it always prohibits such behavior.

Footnote 15 is almost as long as this whole section. In it Dr. Sprinkle puts forward an argument that Deuteronomy 22:5 really is about crossdressing, and was "...to safeguard the division between male and female" a claim for which he cites P. J. Harland [check that source!!] before saying that we need to know "whether this command still applies today", observing that the surrounding passages all don't apply today and then rather than concluding that the context would argue against a modern application, concludes "The near context doesn't give us much help in determining modern applications of this verse". He then goes on to address the objection that the verse in question only refers to cultic activity but rejects that on the grounds that "nothing in the near context of Deuteronomy seems particularly concerned with cultic practices" and also that "the generic termsgeber ("man") and ishah ("woman") would be an odd choice if cultic practices were meant. Honestly I find his reasoning somewhat baffling since most of Deuteronomy has in view the separation of the Hebrews from the cultic practices an allegiances of the nations around them, and secondly because there is no particular reason why the use of generic terms for "man" and "woman" should be an odd choice to use in prohibiting cultic practices. 

Finally, Sprinkle concludes with an argument that the same themes are recapitulated in the New Testament and he cites the 1 Cor 11 passage about head coverings and two of the clobber passages to that effect. His conclusion to this footnote is, rather sedate: "we shouldn't just thoughtlessly cite Deuteronomy 22:5 as if it self-evidently applies to the church, we can say that the driving principle of the command very much resonates with how the rest of Scripture celebrates maintaining certain differences between the sexes (3) [emphasis mine]".  So Sprinkle's long citation for the claim "I see more evidence in favor of X" turns out to be an argument for "X would resonate with my interpretation of other passages". It is worth noting that all of the New Testament passages Sprinkle cited as "resonating" with his preferred interpretation of Deuteronomy 22:5 are themselves highly contested and that Sprinkle is choosing interpretations of them without providing justification or any argumentation for those interpretations. In fact two paragraphs later he is about to admit that 1 Cor 11 "has more interpretive difficulties that Donald Trump has Twitter typos" though acknowledgement of that fact is absent from the footnote. (4)

I hope you see the problem here: Dr. Sprinkle is nodding to the fact that his citations are contested, using further contested passages to support his contested interpretation and then presenting all of this as though he had actually proved the thesis (or at least as though he had supported it with strong evidence and meticulous reasoning) when if fact he hasn't said much beyond "I find this interpretation most compelling".

Sprinkle does include an additional paragraph on the term malakoi but again he is choosing a highly contested term and the only citation he provides for his assertion is from William Loader. I have already written about the term (I lean towards "morally pliable" as the best translation in context). Loader is a fine scholar but I was again disappointed to see that Sprinkle neither acknowledged the fact that this term is hotly debated nor provided any reason for preferring Loader's argument over, say, James Brownson's.

The rest of this section consists of a more-than-slightly homophobic reading of Romans 1 without any acknowledgment of the wildly contested scholarship on this passage for which Sprinkle cites a single source (Kyle Harper's From Shame to Sin), an acknowledgement that the passages he has used are often used poorly, the sentence "I can't emphasize enough that we shouldn't assume each of these passages speaks directly or definitively to modern questions about transgender identities" which is more than a little strange since that is what Dr. Sprinkle seems to be doing in the book—or at least he is behaving as though his theses rest on more than indirect contested readings—, and an announcement that he will hold off on his interpretation of Galatians 3:28 (the "there is no longer male and female" passage) for Chapter 6 and the questions raised by the existence of intersex people for Chapter 7. 

In response, my own interpretation of Romans 1 can be found HERE and I would certainly recommend a thorough reading of multiple biblical interpretations to anyone who is working to understand and apply that passage (5). I also want to just highlight the fact that, while it is, on the one hand, reasonable for Dr. Sprinkle to postpone a long and complex analysis of a tricky passage to a separate chapter, doing so can create the impression that the objections apparently raised by this won't prove to be of any concern. And because Dr. Sprinkle is going to be building his later arguments on the claims he makes in this chapter the canny reader will have to remember that any conclusions Sprinkle arrives at between now and then will have to be held provisionally with the possibility that, if he fails to make a compelling argument in Chapter 6, this thesis from Chapter 4 will have to be abandoned, and that is a very hard thing to do. Generally best practice for presenting an argument is to begin with premises and build to conclusions. Using a conclusion as a provisional premise while asking the reader to remember throughout that it is provisional is inelegant at best and slippery rhetoric at worst.

Conclusion

Dr. Sprinkle's support for this thesis is, on examination, by his own admission throughout the section, not as strong as he seems to project. A more accurate reading of Dr. Sprinkle's claim here might be something to the effect of "Based on limited research, I have provisionally concluded that Scripture can be interpreted to prohibit cross-sex behavior." though notably, Dr. Sprinkle never seems to define quite what he means by "cross-sex behavior".

7. THE INCARNATION OF CHRIST AFFIMRS THE GOODNESS OF OUR SEXED EMBODIMENT

This is a bizarre section and it is really hard not to question Dr. Sprinkle's motives in structuring it the way he did. Certainly the way he "supports" the thesis is bizzare insofar as he never actually argues for it. If the thesis statement had merely been "The Incarnation of Christ Affirms the Goodness of our Embodiment" there really wouldn't be much to say about it in a popular text and Dr. Sprinkle's sources and citations for the claim would be sort of minimally adequate for a generally non-controversial claim, if not comprehensive (He cites Marc Cortez, Stanley Grenz, Rikk E. Watts, and John Stackhouse). But in the second paragraph Dr. Sprinkle puts forward the claim that "If Jesus didn't have a body—a sexed body—he wouldn't have borne God's image" which is just...strange. He doesn't provide really any justification for this second claim, he just asserts it. 

Why did Jesus' body have to be sexed in order for Jesus to bear God's image? What is Dr. Sprinkle trying to argue about the hypostatic union here? Does Dr. Sprinkle believe that the Holy Spirit (who does not have a body) does not bear God's image? What would it even mean to say that Jesus (Dr. Sprinkle is orthodox enough that he does affirm the divinity of Jesus) didn't bear the image of God—that the one who is Very God would not bear God's image if that One wasn't sexed? On what basis is Dr. Sprinkle claiming that it was necessary for Jesus to be sexed rather than that sexed-ness was an accident of Jesus' being human (Jesus is both fully God and fully human and humans are generally sexed so Jesus ended up sexed). Would Dr. Sprinkle also say that Jesus being a brunette was necessary for his bearing God's image? 

There are so many questions and obvious objections that this claim raises which Dr. Sprinkle seems to just ignore. His only other footnote to this section is to the final claim in it that "Jesus' sexed embodiment challenges the notion that biology is irrelevant to identity" and I will address that footnote but before I do I want to point out the claim itself doesn't particularly support the thesis it purports to. Even if it were true that Jesus sexed embodiment challenges the notion that biology is irrelevant to identity, it doesn't follow that the incarnation affirms the goodness of sexed embodiment any more than it would follow from the (odd) claim the Jesus'brunette embodiment challenges the notion that hair color is irrelevant to identity would imply somehow that the incarnation affirms the goodness of haired embodiment. 

Now the footnote. Footnote 21 appears at the end of the sentence about Jesus' sexed embodiment challenging the notion that biology is irrelevant to identity, which might give a casual reader the impression that Dr. Sprinkle has provided sources, evidence, or argumentation for this claim. Instead the footnote is entirely taken up with whether or not Jesus' maleness means that women do not bear the image of God. Rather alarmingly Dr. Sprinkle doesn't even reach a conclusion on this question. Instead he goes back and forth on it citing different passages from Pauline epistles before providing a list of readings for people who want to further explore the question. He does not categorically rule out the possibility that only humans of the male sex actually bear the image of God.

Conclusion

In this section Dr. Sprinkle begins with a strange claim, proceeds not to actually defend the strange part of his claim, makes several further odd claims without support or argument and then ends with a footnote in which is is skeptical towards, but not categorically closed to, the possibility that only male humans bear the image of God. It seems almost as thought Sprinkle hoped that his readers would accept his addition of "sexed" to the thesis statement without really noticing or questioning where it came from and then panicked, waved to general support for the less controversial (and less relevant) part of the claim before very strangely choosing to include a footnote that holds open the possibility of a wildly misogynistic claim which, if true,would totally undermine points he makes elsewhere in the book about the full equality in dignity and image bearer status of men and women. 

Beyond that though, I am struck at this point that Dr. Sprinkle is creating here the impression that trans people think that biology or sexed-ness is irrelevant to identity which just isn't true. After all when I call myself a trans woman, the importance of biology it is necessarily implicit in that identity claim. In saying that I am a trans woman I am saying that I am a woman who was assigned male at birth due to my sex being characteristic of males of our species. Sexed-ness and biology are all over that. 

8. SEX DIFFERENCE PROBABLY REMAINS AFTER THE RESURRECTION

This is another of the longer sections of the Chapter. Sprinkle begins by developing the idea that resurrection bodies are important including the claim "What we will be like then provides a moral basis for how we should live now. [emphasis original]" which he defends using the 1 Cor 6 passage about uniting the Body of Christ with a prostitute. In this he seems to assume that the moral argument Paul is making rests on the fact of resurrection (Paul does reference resurrection just prior) rather than the idea that what we do with our bodies is done by Christ's body because we are all members of Christ's body. He concludes the first paragraph with the assertion that "Christian ethics is rooted in bodily resurrection". I don't know that I would say "rooted" but certainly I would agree that resurrection is really important to Christian ethics.

Sprinkle then moves on to address the further contention that resurrection bodies will be sexed. While I am generally inclined to agree with him that they will—they will be sexed or unsexed according to what best aligns with our total person as we have become and will be becoming—I found it a little disappointing that, rather than address those texts which challenge his view, Dr. Sprinkle merely lists a few and then, again, points to Chapter 6, repeating his rhetorical move from the previous section.

Having recognized that there are passages which challenge his claim and then punted on them, Sprinkle proceeds to make his case in four parts only after emphasizing that "there's a good deal of ambiguity in what exactly our resurrected bodies will be like. We don't know far more than we do know. [emphasis original]" which, again ought to emphasize the degree to which any conclusions he will later base on this chapter must be read as tenuous. In fact it seems to me that, if Dr. Sprinkle is so uncertain in his reasoning it may not be appropriate for him to be recommending even a posture of skepticism towards the accounts of the transgender people who have the benefit of first hand experience of gender incongruity.

Regardless, Sprinkle's reasons for thinking that "it's more likely that our bodies will be sexed in the resurrection [emphasis mine]" are: 1. Thesis Statement 2; 2. Thesis Statements 7 and 3; 3.The claim that Jesus' resurrection is a model for our own resurrection; and 4. The claims that our bodies are important to Paul and that (per Thesis Statement 1) the sexed-ness of our bodies is "significant to our embodied existence and our personhood" suggest that "sex differences will be part of our resurrected state". Since reasons 1,2 and 4 recursively depend on previous Thesis statements (go back now and ask yourself how convinced you are that those statements are accurate and what it means that Dr. Sprinkle is not building another premise on them) the only one to address here is reason 3. So while I would agree that Jesus' resurrection is a model for our own, I don't see where Dr. Sprinkle has any grounds to act as though he knows even that Jesus' body was sexed after the resurrection. At least in any way that Dr. Sprinkle seems to mean the term "sexed" (remember from Chapter 2that he never does quite define the term) the New Testament doesn't give any indication as to Jesus' post resurrection sex, which makes this rather an odd claim for Sprinkle to base his Thesis Statement.

Conclusion

For my conclusion to this section I want to simply quote Dr. Sprinkle's conclusion and add emphasis (bold and italics) to the ways in which he qualifies his Thesis Statement:

Again I want to hold these four points with an open hand, and I recommend that you do too. We're trying to fill in several silent gaps with assumptions—theologically informed assumptions, but assumptions nevertheless. And yet, it does appear more likely that our future resurrected bodies will be sexed and less likely that we'll be given androgynous bodies in the resurrection. If our future glorified existence will be in a sexed body, then it would seem reasonably consistent that we should honor our embodied sex now. This approach does at least resonate with the dominant way in which Scripture values our sexed embodiment as integral to our humanity.

Notice please that the last sentence is merely a re-statement of Thesis Statement 3 and, if you go back and re-read you will remember that Dr. Sprinkle did actually establish the "sexed" part of "Adam and Eve's Bodies are Viewed as Sacred" in that section but is acting here as though he had. 

Chapter Conclusion

Dr. Sprinkle ends the chapter with three paragraphs and an additional sentence that he calls a "Summary". In fact the summary is contained in the first paragraph of the section and consists of restating Dr. Sprinkle's oft-stated but never demonstrated claim that "Scripturally, biological sex is a significant aspect of human identity" a claim that is not, in fact, challenging to transgender identities—I don't know of any trans person who views the parts of their physiology that Dr. Sprinkle here is presumably referring to as "biological sex" as being insignificant. If we thought those aspects of our bodies were insignificant then those of us who chose to change them wouldn't really have any reason to do so. The problem of course is that Sprinkle seems to be slipping in the unspoken claim that because they are significant, it is wrong to change them. He will get into this question more directly in later chapters (he sort of has to) but it is worth noting here that none of this chapter has even claimed to support that conclusion. At most Dr. Sprinkle has spent a chapter offering heavily qualified and too-often poorly sourced reasons for believing that "biological sex is a significant aspect of human identity".

After that Dr. Sprinkle acknowledges (to his credit) that "We need to hit the brakes if you think we're ready to say that biological sex and not gender (identity or role) define who we are", reiterates that this isn't something the Bible speaks to directly, and spends several sentences reminding us of the importance of being "thorough and cautious, humbly considering all angles in the discussion" which risks giving the impression that he has done or is going to do anything of the sort, and reiterates his summary statement. He ends with a hook into his next chapter dealing with questions of masculinity and femininity. I will do likewise.

Series Index

Intro

Part 1—Chapter 1: People

Part 2—Chapter 2A: Terms

Part 3—Chapter 2B: Sex and Gender

Part 4—Chapter 3: Varieties of Trans 

Part 5—Chapter 4: Male, Female & The Image of God

Part 6—Chapter 5: Gender Stereotypes

Footnotes:

1. I am not here commenting on whether Adam and Eve ought to be read as literal or true-mythical figures as I don't see that it makes any difference for the purposes of this topic.

2. I am not here personally commenting on the legitimacy of divorce as that is not the focus of this review series. For what it is worth I do not in fact believe that Matthew 19 constitutes an outright ban on divorce and remarriage.

3. I was disappointed to find that at no point does Dr. Sprinkle ever seem to say precisely which differences he believes God is trying to preserve.

4. I have provided my own, different interpretation of the Romans 1 and 1 Cor 2 texts Dr. Sprinkle cites Here and Here and you can find one of many discussions of the 1 Cor 11 HERE

5. I particularly recommend Dr. James Brownson's Bible, Gender, Sexuality and Sarah Ruden's Paul Among the People as counterpoint texts to Dr. Sprinkle's interpretation

The Sweetest Poisons: Preston Sprinkle's "Embodied" Chapter 3: Varieties of Trans. A Review

This is the fifth installment in my series reviewing Preston Sprinkle's book Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, & What the Bible has to Say. Click HERE for the Intro to this series where I discuss my thematic concerns with the book and for an index for the full series.

A transgender person is anyone whose gender identity does not align with the sex they were assigned at birth.

I need to foreground the standard definition of what the term transgender means before we launch into this chapter because this is where all the prep work Preston Sprinkle did in the previous two chapters, introducing the subject and defining a bunch of terms in ways that suit his arguments, really starts to pay off in tragically misleading ways. The definition above doesn't actually conflict with the one Sprinkle provided at the beginning of Chapter 2—an umbrella term for the many ways in which people might experience and/or present and express (or live out) their gender identities differently from people whose sense of gender identity is congruent with their biological sex—but keeping the original front and center will do a lot to show how far Sprinkle wants to drift from it. 

We also need to keep in mind Sprinkle's deployment of trans* with the asterisk which he is using as a sort of larger umbrella than the term transgender above:

...some people put an asterisk after the word trans, styling it as trans*, when they want to use it as a broad umbrella term to include a whole range of identities that aren't strictly transgender, such as nonbinary, genderqueer, and the like. I'll do the same in this book.

As I referenced in the intro to this series, Sprinkle's choice to use trans* with the asterisk is decidedly non-standard and was not standard in 2021 when the book was published. I would love to know who the "some people" from the above definition actually are; unfortunately Sprinkle didn't provide any citation for that portion of Chapter 2. I was able to locate trans* in 2 out of 5 online glossaries of LGBTQ+ related terms and in neither of them was there an indication that trans* indicates identities that don't already fall under the trans or transgender umbrella. The closest thing to that claim was the observation that using trans* rather than trans does a better job of expressing inclusion of certain non-binary identities. That may be where Sprinkle got the idea but if so then he has made a leap from the claim that one term is better at expressing an inclusivity that both are intended to express, to the claim that one expresses a greater degree of inclusivity than the other. In effect he has taken the step of reifying a distinction that is not intended by any original users of the term.

Sprinkle structures Chapter 3 around brief explanations of his different categories of "trans*" people. So far as I have been able to find this taxonomy is unique to Sprinkle.

So Let's buckle up dive in to his categories:

Gender Dysphoric Trans*

Sprinkle is, at some level at least, aware of the fact that gender dysphoria is a particular experience, one for which transition is really the only recognized treatment. Sprinkle is perfectly correct to observe that "some trans*-identified people experience gender dysphoria, and some don't" but he goes on to assert that "For those who do, there are two broad categories: early-onset gender dysphoria and "late-onset gender dysphoria" which is technically true since trans people who experience gender dysphoria do begin experiencing it at a variety of ages and the late vs early onset has been used in the past but then there are a lot of ways that people who experience gender dysphoria can be divided into categories (severity of the dysphoria, birth assigned sex, those who do and do not decide to transition etc...) it is worth noticing now that this particular taxonomy happens to serve his purpose later in the chapter.

Regardless, Sprinkle goes on to focus on early-onset gender dysphoria and immediately spreads some misinformation. His concluding paragraph on the topic claims "And for most kids [gender dysphoria] goes away. According to all available studies done on the persistence rate of dysphoria in kids, 61 to 88 percent of early-onset dysphoria cases end up desisting; that is, the dysphoria goes away over puberty". He does have a footnote for this assertion and in it he admits that "this 'desistance' rate has been the subject of much controversy," (which already calls into question his main text claim about "all available studies") and then cites a paper justifying conversion therapy for trangender kids from his own organization his own organization and a blog post from James Cantor, a notoriously transphobic psychologist whose "work" around transgender people has been critisized by multible mainstream medical associations. Both cite a number of studies but this 2016 piece by Brynn Tannehill demonstrates just how horribly flawed the assumptions, methods, and processes that went into making up that "61-88%" desistance rate are. To hand wave those serious methodological flaws as "controversy" and to hide even that away in a footnote and away from the main text is, frankly, misleading to the point of being dishonest. Further, since the release of Sprinkle's book, studies have been released setting the number at a whopping 6% of children who present with gender dysphoria and go on to desist, making the audacity of Sprinkle's claims and the severely biased nature of his "research" rather starkly apparent. I would very much encourage you to read more about this HERE (this video is a nice tl;dr by the author) and decide for yourself whether or not Preston's numbers are accurate and whether the language and certainty he projects in the main text are justified.

Non-Gender Dysphoric Trans* 

Before we get into what Sprinkle has to say in this section I want to be clear that "experiencing vs. not-experiencing gender dysphoria" is not a way in which trans people categorize ourselves. The fact of the matter is that on the one hand it is true that someone does not have to experience dysphoria to be trans—to be trans is to have a gender identity which doesn't align with the sex you were assigned at birth, whereas gender dysphoria is an experience of distress that is caused by said misalignment, so if you are trans, you don't become less so by not suffering as a result—and on the other hand gender dysphoria manifests in many different ways and many people who do experience dysphoria do not recognized that that is what they are experiencing for quite a while.

So with that as background, Sprinkle starts this section off in what is becoming typical of his misleading-while-giving-himself-a-technical-out method: he quotes a trans YouTuber claiming to be "1000% transgender" and also to identify 1000% as the gender he was assigned at birth. In the footnote to this strange claim, Sprinkle allows that the YouTuber in question later retracted that statement but Sprinkle apparently didn't think that fact deserved a place in the main text. More troubling, he goes on to use that retracted quote as a jumping off point to start talking about a "'self-ID' perspective" in which "if you say you're trans*, then you're trans*" which itself is a starting point for him to begin discussing trans-medicalism (without naming it). It is unclear what the retracted quote has to do with dysphoria or what purpose Sprinkle thinks it is serving in his book and the Sprinkle's claims about self-ID are, again, a severe misrepresentation of what trans people actually think and say. The claim "if you say you're trans then you're trans*" does not, when spoken by the community, mean that speaking the phrase "I am trans" will magically grant a status of transness. It means that people should not be required to demonstrate or perform misery or suffering in order to be recognized as trans. Some trans people, for instance, do not experience gender dysphoria but they do experience gender euphoria when they are able to live into their actual gender identity. It means that each person is in the best/only position to know whether the sex they were assigned at birth aligns with their gender identity. 

Sprinkle ends the section by misrepresenting Natalie Wynn as saying that performance is all there is to gender, and then citing Blaire White as disagreeing. Sprinkle doesn't provide a citation for either woman so his claim that Natalie Wynn "says that if you live like a woman, then you're a woman" is hard to verify but, as someone who has watched most (all?) of her video essays I can very safely say that that quote does not represent anything like the full complexity of Wynn's views on what constitutes womanhood or transness. Meanwhile Blaire White is, for sure, a transmedicalist but whose views can't really be said to represent anything close to a consensus or even established position in contemporary transgender discourse (popular or academic). Sprinkle ends by asking (and not answering) "Which one is right? And why? What does it mean to be trans*" an odd question given that he has already provided his definition. 

Trans* Experience Vs. Trans* Ontology

Sprinkle does...a lot with this section of the chapter. It is worth reiterating that he purports to be descriptive in each of these sections and does not write as though he were making an argument but as though he were reporting on the phenomenon of transness. That mode of writing allows him to wildly over-represent extremely minority accounts as nonetheless representative of trans people. For instance, in this section he spends most of his time talking about two people: Kat and Dan. Kat is a woman who identifies as transgender but also as the sex she was assigned at birth. She identifies as transgender because she experiences gender dysphoria but, for religious reasons, has chosen not to transition or to identify as the man or non-binary person she actually experiences herself to be. (Sprinkle does not provide all of this information but he interviewed a Kat on his podcast and I am working from that. 

Meanwhile the picture that Preston paints with "Dan" (I was unable to determine who Sprinkle is talking about) is both representative of what people generally actually mean by "transgender" and is also rather wildly revealing of Preston's actual beliefs given that he introduces "Dan" by misgendering her and then switches to she/her only after punting on the question of pronoun usage. 

We will have to wait for the next chapter before Sprinkle actually weighs in with anything like an argument on this question so before moving on I will note again that, in this section Sprinkle presents as representative, a view that is—at best—such an overwhelmingly minority view that most transgender people would find it baffling—it wouldn't even register as a common mistake or dispute.

ROGD Trans*

Sprinkle takes two paragraphs to introduce this as a concept then punts to Chapter 10 granting, at least, that "Lots of discussions (and heated debates) surround ROGD" (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria). It is worth noting that he also identifies the derogative term trans trender in this section and objects to it's use not because it "can feel like it's invalidating someone's experience" as such but because that "is never a great way to start a relationship. Sprinkle's concern is evangelistic and propagandistic, rather than person-centered. He also includes the claim that "there does seem to be a good deal of evidence that social influences are one reason some (perhaps many) teenagers and young adults identify as trans*"  Which, for any reasonable definition of "a good deal of evidence" is a false claim since the only study which has even purported to support ROGD was so methodologically flawed that the journal which published it chose to take it down for amendments and to moderate its conclusion.

I will engage with Sprinkle's actual arguments and debate in my response to Chapter 10 so for now here are several articles pointing out the flaws in the ROGD "theory":

• Julia Serano: Everything You Need To Know About Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria
• The Journal of Pediatrics: Do Clinical Data from Transgender Adolescents Suppport the Phenomenon of "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria"?
  
• Medical News Today: What is Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria?

And here is an excellent podcast episode with a case study of the harm caused by ROGD
Seduction of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria

Trans* Detransitioners  

Detransitioners do exist and they absolutely need to be heard. Sprinkle reasonably referrs to detransitioners (people who had transitioned to at least some extent who choose to go back to living as their assigned gender) as "another group of (former?) trans* people" since the degree to which detransitioners identify as trans is significantly varied. After that, though, Sprinkle goes on to list potential reasons for detransition and comes up with: dissatisfaction with "the operation"1, depression and anxiety not going away after transition, and fading ROGD. He provides no citation though so I looked it up. In fact, in 2021 the NIH released a significant study on the reasonons for detransition and found that:

In this national study, 13.1% of TGD respondents who had ever pursued gender affirmation reported a history of detransition. To our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically examine reasons for detransition in a large national sample of TGD adults. The vast majority of participants reported detransition due at least in part to external factors, such as pressure from family, nonaffirming school environments, and sexual assault. External pressures such as family rejection, school-based harassment, lack of government affirmation, and sexual violence have previously been associated with increased suicide attempts in TGD populations.

credit Sophie Labelle @AssigneeGarcon

 Note that Sprinkle's three reasons don't appear as any of the major reasons for transition. In fact the reasons Sprinkle highlights account for, at most, 18% of reasons for detransition while a lack of social/medical/familial/financial  support (which, I would argue, Sprinkle is contributing to here) account for the "vast majority" of cases. That is not the impression that Dr. Sprinkle conveys in this
short section and it is well worth asking why not. Also, while that study was published after Dr. Sprinkle's book he had access to similar data in one of the largest ever surveys of transgender people published by the National Center for Transgender Equality which found that only 9% of respondents had detransitioned for any of the reasons in Sprinkle's list while, again, the vast majority of detransitioners cited a lack of family/social/medical/financial support. 

Autogynephilic Trans*

This isn't a thing. Sprinkle does allow that "it doesn't exist and you're transphobic if you say it does" is a position that people take on this topic but, as we have seen him do several times already, he uses format and insinuation to give the impression that autogynephilia has far more legitimacy that it. in fact does. First, note that he conjoins "autogynephilia doesn't exist" with "an you're transphobic if you say it does" thereby putting everyone to whom the idea sounds even vaguely plausible on the defensive against any argument against the existence of autogynephilia. In this section Dr. Sprinkle provides a definition of autogynephilia as a term which "describes an experience where a biological male is erotically aroused at the thought of himself as a female" which isn't quite accurate. The term in fact was developed by Ray Blanchard as a category of paraphelia (think kink or fetish) in which a man is turned on at the thought of himself as a woman, thus when people say that "autogynephilia doesn't exist" they do not mean, as Sprinkle assumes, that no man (or trans woman) has ever been turned on by thoughts of being a woman, they mean that autogynephilia is not a paraphilia, nor is it a category of trans woman. You see the problem? Sprinkle uses the weak defition (the experience of being aroused at a particular concept) as his defintion but they goes on to act as though people identifying with that experience (Sprinkle cites two friends of his and two other individuals who identify with autogynephilia) as supporting the claims of people who use the hard definition of autogynephilia as a paraphilia. He is equivocating. 

Spinkle makes the rather strong statement in this section that "based on everything I've read and the people I've talked to, I believe without a doubt that some trans* people are autogynephilic" which he then supports with reference to the two friends one of whom, he admits, doesn't even experience "autogynephilia" as something erotic—which is rather the whole deal when it comes to any traditional "hard" definition of autogynephilia.

OK so I had better explain a bit more about what autogynephilia purports to be and why I opened this section declaring that it "isn't a thing". First I need to state that autogynephilia isn't a thing because every major psychological association rejects it both as a legitimate category of trans person and as a diagnosable paraphilia. Generally one runs into autogynephilia being proposed either as a sort of alternative to "real" transness, or as an argument that trans-ness generally is nothing more than an elaborate fetish. The former is rather personally frustrating to me as it was my own youthful exposure to the autogynephilia-as-fake-transness idea that persuaded me for over two decades that I was "not actually trans".

The core problem, in both instances (autogynephilia as a category of trans women and autogynephilia as a paraphilia) is that cis women are also routinely aroused in ways that involve understanding and imagining themselves as women. It is actually relatively rare to find a cis woman for whom imagining herself as a woman is not at least a part of her erotic fantasy life which means that when a trans woman finds that thinking of herself as a woman is a component of her erotic fantasy life she is just...experiencing the standard fantasy life of a woman. 

Sprinkle has to have been aware of this (prior to the publication of his book I actually shared several resources with him which clarify those problems with the theory) but goes to great lengths (I will examine them below) to give the impression that autogynephilia is somehow nevertheless a live option in the trans community but he somehow never gets around to mentioning the fact that, as a theory and as a category it has been roundly discredited by the psychological community. He does recommend Alice Dreger's book Galileo's Middle Finger (Dreger is a historian) for "a punchy review for some of the controversy surrounding autogynephilia" but fails to mention that Dreger is generally understood in the trans community to be transphobic and a supporter of quack pseudoscience. In fact all four of the people cited in the main text of this section (Alice Dreger, Ray Blanchard, J Michael Bailey, and Anne Lawrence) are all thoroughly anti-transgender partisans whose work has been thoroughly debunked.

Citation & Misrepresentation

I can't end this section without mentioning one last galling choice Dr. Sprinkle makes in this section. In footnote 12 Sprinkle provides citation for the claim that "Trans* people themselves hold a wide range of opinions on autogynephilia" by citing Julia Serano and Miranda Yardley. This is, of course, technically true inasmuch as it is possible to find someone in any category who believes almost anything. Trans people (particularly trans women) who believe that autogynephilia is a legitimate category of transgender person (and/or a real reason that someone might think they are trans without actually being trans) are, however, very much on the fringe. Thus, Dr. Sprinkle's habit of "listing views" without ever(?) distinguishing between mainstream and fringe views ends up subtly misleading the reader. Saying that "American women themselves hold a wide range of opinions on patriarchal polygamy" and then citing that with two specific women who have written on the subject would technically be a true statement but would give the misleading impression that patriarchal polygamy is a live option in the United States when it simply isn't. 

Dr. Sprinkle's choice of women to list as representative of the spectrum of views on this is itself rather a tell sort of cops to this problem. I have cited Julia Serano frequently in this series and will continue to do so because she is an excellent authority transgender theory in US, particularly among transgender women. Serano holds a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from Columbia University, has published in multiple academic scholarly journals, and wrote the seminal book on transgender theory and feminism: Whipping Girl (A text Sprinkle has admitted to not having read prior to the publication of his book despite having been referred to on on multiple occasions); Miranda Yardley holds a bachelors degree in accounting, runs a music magazine, and has written some articles about trans theory on her personal website. These two sources are not equal, but none of that is going to be apparent to a casual reader of Embodied.

If this sort of misleading mischaracterization were a one off then I could reasonably be accused of nit-picking here. Unfortunately it is representative of Sprinkle's approach throughout the book.

Mental Health Concerns Among Trans*

It might seem a little bit precocious but I want to note that the titles for most of these sections are grammatically incorrect. "transgender" "trans" and even "trans*" are all adjectives. Just as it would be grammatically incorrect to say "Mental Health Concerns Among Short" it is incorrect to say "Mental Health Concerns Among Trans*". This is not, on its own, a serious issue but it does suggest that Dr. Sprinkle is not actually all that familiar with transgender people and transgender discourse. To the average cis person those grammar errors probably don't stand out much, but to a trans person they read like the glaringly bad grammar that they are.

As to the content of this section, despite its length, the problems are fairly easy to summarize. Sprinkle notes the well documented correlation between people on the autism spectrum and who have various mental health issues, and people who are trans. He then goes on to speculate rather oddly on the possibility of an autistic person who has OCD who "has an ongoing obsession with the idea of becoming the other sex". He then has a paragraph talking about making sure that people don't think they are trans due to factors actually rooted in a mental health concern or in their being autistic, and a final paragraph reminding his readers that: "It would be untruthful to assume that every biological male who identifies as trans* is autogynephilic or on the autism spectrum of has an underlying mental health issue" which is accurate enough but gives the impression that there is some significant portion of people who think that they are trans but are actually suffering from some mental health condition or are autistic and somehow confuse that for trans-ness. That theory doesn't hold up to the data we have about trans people now and it didn't hold up to the data we had when Sprinkle first published the book.

In general the enormous missing piece in Sprinkle's analysis in this chapter is the whole concept of minority stress which has already been document (and had well before Dr. Sprinkle wrote this book) to have a significant impact on the physical and mental health of queer people generally and transgender people specifically. In fact is now also well documented that affirming health care and social support can largely to totally mitigate any increase in mental health challenges transgender people might experience in contrast to our cisgender counterparts. The conclusion of this 2016 report (four years before Dr. Sprinkle published Embodied) from the American Academy of Pediatrics is worth quoting here:

Socially transitioned transgender children who are supported in their gender identity have developmentally normative levels of depression and only minimal elevations in anxiety, suggesting that psychopathology is not inevitable within this group.

 Trans* As Internal Homophobia or Misogyny

The reasoning in this section is somewhat twisted. Sprinkle's basic thesis is that some people transition, not because they are trans, but because they suffer either from internalized homophobia or (in the case of some cis women) internalized misogyny. It is not clear to me how Dr. Sprinkle justifies calling these people "trans*" given that his definition of "trans*" would seem to preclude any category of people whose gender identity doesn't actually differ from the sex they were assigned at birth. If Preston Sprinkle wants to warn about cis people transitioning for bad reasons, that is one thing (though I would argue that the data I have been citing throughout this piece rather undercuts his idea that this accounts for any significant number of people who choose to transition) but it doesn't justify his categorizing people who don't fit his own definition of "trans*"ness as trans*.

It is worth saying the meantime, that the evidence he provides to support his assertion that the "story of [transness as] repressed homophobia is more widespread than you might think" consists entirely of a single cis lesbian who transitioned for a year and a single paywalled article from The Times which Sprinkle summarizes as "Some therapists wonder if certain parents who are highly supportive of their child identifying as transgender could be motivated by a homophobic fear about their child being gay" [emphasis mine]—hardly the sort of evidence that ought to be required for a robustly stated "is more widespread than you might think" from a professional academic. To be fair, Dr. Sprinkle does go on to provide adequate citation for his claim that Iran performs gender transition procedures and outlaws homosexuality but it is not clear to me how that reinforces a claim about what might motivate cis people in countries where homosexuality is legal and where trans people are more likely to face both social stigma, violence, and repressive laws than our queer cis counterparts.

As to the misogyny claim, Sprinkle's evidence consists entirely of a single anecdote and an online non-scientific survey (I was not even able to locate a methodology statement) which seems to have circulated primarily in anti-trans spaces. In fact when I googled the author and survey Sprinkle cites here (footnote 21 of Chapter 3) all I was able to find was a reference to a survey in a tweet from a Twitter account entitled "Detrans Voices" @FtMDetransed which provided two screenshots of a Google Forms survey and a link to request access to the Google Forms Survey. The author Sprinkle cites (Haley Mangelsdorf) seems to be either a ghost or a pen name as a search for that name brings up only a link to a zine which I have not been able to track down, and a reference to the survey on 4thwavenow a notorious anti-trans website and forum. It seems likely that Sprinkle got this source from one or the other of those sources, but it is odd that he would see fit to include this as a citation in his putatively academic text. 

Listening Love

This final section in the chapter starts of pretty well. Sprinkle's thesis for the section is that Christians need to be more loving towards trans people and I am all on board with that. Unfortunately he tries to illustrate the importance of that by going back to his story of Kat who detransitioned(2) after working with a woman at Kat's church who listened and responded with "I'm not sure. But I'd love to explore this with you" after Kat asked her What God thinks about transness and transition. I say "unfortunately" but it is also helpful that this provides a bit of a "mask off" moment in the book. The strong impression you get reading this section is that for Sprinkle, the goal of Christian interactions with trans people is for us to not transition. The second to last paragraph sums it up as:

Some people might enjoy being instructed by a person who seems to have all the right answers—a two-legged Google with a mouth that never seems to shut. But I think most people are like Kat. They want to know the truth, but they want to find it with a friend.

Preston Sprinkle wants his cis Christian audience to guide trans people away from transition or even really identifying as the women, non-binary people, and men that we are; he just wants them to be nice while they are doing it. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar after all. 

Series Index

Intro

Part 1—Chapter 1: People

Part 2—Chapter 2A: Terms

Part 3—Chapter 2B: Sex and Gender

Part 4—Chapter 3: Varieties of Trans 

Part 5—Chapter 4: Male, Female & The Image of God

Part 6—Chapter 5: Gender Stereotypes

Footnote

1. I have no idea why Sprinkle focuses on "the surgery" here since plenty of detransitioners detransition after taking HRT without any surgeries, while the regret rate for gender affirming surgery is only 2%. It seems that Sprinkle may be going more for shock value than for an accurate representation of the state of affairs. He spends some time speculating on the possiblity of and autistic person suffering from OCD

2. According to Sprinkle Kat identifies as transgender despite now identifying with the gender Kat was assigned at birth on account of still experiencing gender dysphoria. It is worth noticing that this does actually place Kat outside of Sprinkle's original definition of what it means to be transgender.